Fuck, Tilly is Droning.

Which is not, you know, a commentary on delivery? It's not that she's monotone or dull or whatever. She's got passion, she's animated. 

It's just that Droning, capital D, isn't actually about communication? 

It's about posturing, performing, being seen to speak, while not actually delivering anything worth listening to. It's something you do for the benefit of someone other than the person you're talking with?

It's like Berating, which can be done in a kind, calm level voice, in that the goal isn't for two people to accurately convey what went wrong where and how to keep it from happening again. It's about making the berater feel powerful and the beratee feel small. You done fucked up, Dyssia, and now whoever's doing the berating is going to go in circles about how.

Honestly, she'd feel worse about getting good at pretending to listen if it wasn't all the same horseshit, over and over. Nod appreciatively/contritely/scornfully as appropriate--which in this case is, you know, not at all, she's a prisoner, not a sap--put a tiny portion of brain towards flagging anything different enough to be important, and wow, would you look at that, suddenly you have a skull empty and ready to pore over something [i]actually[/i] important.

Like, for instance, would her doppleganger be better than her?

No, no, of course not. More boring, in any of a hundred ways, first off, which is ultimately the single worst thing you can be.  And there's no way she'd be able to wander in here and stare down her nose at an entire court if she didn't honestly believe she was the best for the job. Suck it, all y'all, you're wrong, and there's no version of her that could do it like her.

Do it differently, though…

She has to know how it works, right? Before she can figure out other uses, she needs to know how to works. Tilly's using it as a weapon, because she's an asshole with no vision. Summon--duplicate? No, no, can't be duplicate, or else everyone there would know who's who, right? Summon? Where from? Who from? For how long? Do they stay summoned? What's the cost to stay summoned?

How many times can you summon dopplegangers? What's the limit? Is it only living--no, no, the entire point of mining beri was to get more crystals, right? One planet is known to have the crystals needed. Mine it infinitely, infinite crystals, suddenly you can duplicate more planets.

More importantly, you can duplicate people. Empty cities fill up. Empty armies fill up. Ceronians replicate by cloning, right? How many times can they clone? Enough times to overcome infinity? Is that the plan? It can't be, right? Ceronians are the top, you don’t overcome that by just--

Infinite, neverending duplicates. Neverending waves of not just biomantic beetles, but Azura warriors. Maybe? No, no, that doesn’t square. 

What would happen if you struck a god with it? No matter who won--and there's no guarantee that you wouldn't just get one, incredibly pissed god in front of you--you'd lose.

…What would happen if she summoned another of herself? It immediately strikes her as a terrible idea--last time she engaged with the tools of the oppressor, she wound up verbally flipping off a god--and more than that, she doesn't actually know how it works. Or how to turn it on. Or how it's powered. It's an esoteric, it can't be as simple as, you know, flipping a switch on the handle, right?

… How had Tilly activated it, again?

[Look Closely: 1, 6, +2. [b][9][/b]
Tell me about the crystal technology. How could it hurt me? How could it help me?
What will happen if Dyssia duplicates herself?
What's Tilly up to? What are they doing? What will they do next?